


no colors anymore (i want them to turn black)

by lostandlonelybirds (RUNNFROMTHEAK)



Series: Dick Rare Pair Challenge 2020 [8]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics), Titans (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Wayne is Bad at Feelings, Bruce Wayne is a Bad Parent, Dick Grayson is Robin, Donna Troy is a goddess, F/M, Firing your son and telling him he's no longer welcome in your home is shitty, Gen, Hurt Dick Grayson, Hurt/Comfort, No Beta We Die Like Bruce Wayne (if i ever get my hands on him), That incident no one likes talking about, idc if you mom's name is martha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26723287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/pseuds/lostandlonelybirds
Summary: Bruce’s eyes harden.“Your mistakes led to some of my own. I can’t work with someone who can’t follow basic orders.”His pulse thunders on his tongue, painfully loud in the quiet of the cave. He thinks he can hear it, can hear the fear making his heart dance a staccato he doesn’t want Bruce to hear. He holds no power here, not really. Not when he’s injured and weak, drowsy from pain meds and a concussion. Not when his tongue feels sluggish and leaden in his mouth, unable to curl around the right words to fix this.Bruce can’t take Robin away. Not after the last time.He wouldn’t…Would he?
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Donna Troy, pre-Dick Grayson/Donna Troy
Series: Dick Rare Pair Challenge 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1834162
Comments: 6
Kudos: 140
Collections: Dick Grayson Rare Pair Challenge





	no colors anymore (i want them to turn black)

**Author's Note:**

> oops i like angst

It’s fine. It’s okay. It’s downright dandy.

Sure, Bruce isn’t looking at him. Sure, he was shot by the Joker and almost died ( _did_ die on the operating table with the light fading in and out and Alfred’s face openly worried, beyond concerned). Sure, Bruce has been sitting at the Batcomputer, looking over cases and pretending Dick isn’t there.

But it’s okay. It has to be okay. He’d been twelve last time he’d been injured this bad, and Bruce had panicked and fired him, but Dick had talked him back into it. Because Robin is him. He is Robin. It’s his family, their legacy, his identity. Every time he flies, his parents fly with him beyond the grave. Every time he flies, he can pretend everything is perfect and actually feel like it is for a second. Every time he flies, he’s whole.

Robin is a mask, but it’s also the truest to himself he’s really allowed to be with all the other expectations piled onto him.

Bruce can’t take that away again. He can’t. Not after the last time. Not when Dick had explained how much that hurt and it had taken months to rebuild that trust.

“Bruce?” he croaks, throat sore and itchy from disuse. He feels like he’s been run over by a two-ton truck and wrestled Killer Croc in Gotham Bay. He’s a bit loopy from the _excellent_ drugs Alfie’s pumped him with to ward off the pain, but he can feel the sensations (crippling as they are) creep up on him bit by bit.

He notices Bruce’s jaw twitch, fingers clicking on the keys as if Dick isn’t there. That’s never a good sign, nor is the straight set of B’s back, a decent indication of stress (Bruce only slouches when he’s relaxed, falling back on old-money manners and childhood habits when he feels overwhelmed).

“B?”

Bruce turns to him, face half masked by shadows, blue eyes almost dark with the lack of lighting. Dick almost feels like cracking a joke about it, but he can tell that won’t go over well. He’s not sure what will, in this moment. The silence sets him on edge, air suffocatingly tense with a hundred unspoken thoughts and fears lingering in the space between them. Dick’s good at reading between the lines with everyone, especially Bruce, but Bruce doesn’t have any lines to measure by, right now. Even he’s not sure how he feels, what he’s thinking.

It’s confusing. Conflicting. Dick doesn’t know how to fix that haunted look in his eyes. Dick isn’t sure he knows how to fix any of this, all of a sudden. There’s so many things Dick and Bruce leave unspoken, and it feels like they’re all bearing down on his chest at that moment.

“You could have died,” Bruce says flatly, voice even and cold. His eyes are impenetrable, absent of the warmth and comfort they’d so often offered before unspoken communication gave way to _no_ communication. “You almost did.”

Dick pushes himself up against the pillows Alfred stuffed behind him, hissing as he twists the wrong way. His abdomen burns, enough for him to want to scream, but he pushes it down, focusing on the set of B’s mouth, the thinned line that he always hates seeing. Bruce eyes the bandages and gauze Dick’s covered in dispassionately, only a flicker of something like regret in his gaze.

“But I didn’t.”

Bruce clenches his jaw.

“You were reckless.”

Dick jerks a thumb at the bandage around Bruce’s neck, carefully hidden by as much of the cape as he could manage.

“And you weren’t?”

Bruce’s eyes harden.

“Your mistakes led to some of my own. I can’t work with someone who can’t follow basic orders.”

His pulse thunders on his tongue, painfully loud in the quiet of the cave. He thinks he can hear it, can hear the fear making his heart dance a staccato he doesn’t want Bruce to hear. He holds no power here, not really. Not when he’s injured and weak, drowsy from pain meds and a concussion. Not when his tongue feels sluggish and leaden in his mouth, unable to curl around the right words to fix this.

Bruce can’t take Robin away. Not after the last time.

He wouldn’t…

Would he?

“I’m not a kid anymore.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

“And yet you make the mistakes of a child and refuse to learn from them. Batman can’t be weak, and this partnership, _Robin_ …”  
“I make you weak?” Dick breathes out, voice cracking towards the end despite his best efforts. Bruce wavers in his sight, watery and distant, like a cold mirage he can never hope to touch. To hold. To love. Bruce has always been so hard and so easy to love. “Is that what you’re saying?”

There’s a pause, both momentary and endless in its weight. Every breath feels like a wound, deep and shuddering and acidic in its pain. His skin itches. Dick wishes he could scratch it open.

“Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

The words fall from his mouth precisely, as though they’d been rehearsed. Like he’d planned this. Planned _all_ of this. It hurts. Dick doesn’t know what hurts, because everything hurts all of a sudden.

“You can’t mean that,” Dick replies, lip trembling, fists white in the medical cot’s sheets. He can’t ground himself because nothing feels real. This doesn’t feel real. It can’t _be_ real. “We’re partners.”

“ _Were_.” Bruce’s eyes flick over him again, lingering on the patched-up injuries and bags upon bags under his eyes. “We no longer are.”

Dick’s lip trembles, a few tears leak from his eyes, and his lips form the words his heart feels, even knowing it won’t mean anything. It won’t _change_ anything. Emotion never works, and logic only works when Bruce wants it to. He’s been feeling the chasm between him and Bruce grow ever since he joined the Titans, splitting his time between Gotham and New York eagerly, tirelessly. Because there’s a bridge between him and Bruce, a strong one with strong foundations, but age has weathered it, worn down the stone until it softened, placed cracks in the foundations that would inevitably crumble, inevitably break. And as the bridge weakens, the chasm widens, infinite in its expanse and nearly uncrossable.

Dick’s a fool for thinking it would end with anything else.

“I am Robin. He’s…he’s all I have left.”

“You can’t be Robin anymore. You’re _fired_. Leave your keys with Alfred on the way out.”

Dick fights, and Dick rages, and Dick tries desperately to reach across that bridge and find the father he’d though he’d found when his own fell, tries to find the love and trust that had helped him love and accept and move forward after losing everything, but he fails.

He finds nothing but the cold and the quiet cries of the dead amongst the shadows in dark pools of blue.

For all the emotion Bruce Wayne displays, he might as well not be there at all.

* * *

He goes to Donna because he has nowhere else to go. 

That’s not _completely_ true, but he doesn’t know where else to go. Roy would be sympathetic, talk about his troubles with Ollie, but would think Dick’s overreacting. He wouldn’t get what Robin means, because Dick’s never told him. Wally and Garth would try too, in their own ways, but they don’t get it either. None of them do.

He’s only ever told Donna, after all.

Her room smells like salted caramel and some kind of spice, familiar and warm and comforting. He can feel the tears prick at his eyes as she comes into view, lips bare of their signature red and hair curled in loose ringlets around her face. She’d cut it, he thinks. It hadn’t been this short last week.

“Boy Wonder?” she asks, knocking on his head with a teasing smile. “You in there?”

Dick tries to smile back, but it falters, weak and false on his face. Donna’s smile disappears too.

“What’s wrong?”

“Besides everything?” he manages, limping slightly as she motions for him to come in.

Donna frowns, taking in his bandaged and bloodied appearance and the duffle bag on his injured shoulder. He winces, feeling tired and dizzy and more drained than he’s ever felt.

“Well,” Donna says, wrapping him up into a hug and holding tight. “Everything is a pretty good start.”

He hesitates to hug her back, but tentatively returns the gesture. She smells like vanilla, sweet comfort a stark contrast with the overpriced cologne of Bruce (cold and bitter). Donna’s always been warm, it’s part of why they click. Never complains about his need for touch, the way he always has a hand or leg or hip aligned with hers. The way he crawls into her bed some night, craving comfort, and sometimes just needs to talk with soothing fingers combing through his messy locks.

“Bruce kicked me out,” he manages, shuddering in her arms, breathing in the comfort of her shampoo. “Fired me too. I don’t…I’m nothing, now. I don’t have a home, and I’m no one.”

Donna pulls him closer, close enough that he can feel her heart align with his, her nails scrapping his scalp lightly, her chin soft on his shoulder. Their bodies fit together like two puzzle pieces, even if she’s taller than him still.

“You’re an idiot if you think that,” she says softly, words lacking the bite they’d carry if they came from any one but her. She knows him best, and he knows her just as well. Better than the back of his hand. “Your home is with us. With _me_. Home isn’t a place, Dickie, it’s love. And you aren’t _no one_ because a stupid man in a stinky city doesn’t love you the way you deserve.”

Dick rests his eyes on her shoulder, trying to hide the wetness in the thick fabric of her sweater. It’s one of his, he realizes, noticing the way it slips off her other shoulder to reveal scarred skin. He hadn’t realized she’d kept it.

“He raised me. If he doesn’t want me…what did I do wrong, Don? Why are we so…why did he turn cold?”

Donna hums, squeezing him just a bit tighter. Her shoulders are tense, closing him in her embrace.

“It’s not you. It’s _never_ been anything wrong with you, honey. Bruce is…”

Her jaw shifts, and he can picture the way her mouth curls in distaste out of his sight.

“Bruce is a bastard.”

He pulls away to look at her, entranced by the glimmer of anger in ice blue eyes. It’s always a bit of a shock to see her like this. See her angry for him, protective of him. People expressing emotions bluntly isn’t something he’d learned how to deal with under Bruce’s…mentorship?

Is he just a student to him? Not the son he’d always thought Bruce saw him as? Nothing more than a passing face, a temporary cape, never big enough for the shoes Bruce wanted him to fill.

Maybe it all went wrong when he told Bruce he didn’t want to be Batman.

Maybe that’s when Bruce decided Robin no longer served a purpose.

Had he only been a convenience?

Donna’s hand on his cheek pulls him from the swirling storm of increasingly uncomfortable thoughts, warm and safe, inviting, as she makes him look at her.

“This isn’t your fault,” she says, and he can tell she means it. “None of this is your fault. And if Bruce can’t suck up his pride and admit some goddamn emotions, I’ll keep you. You’re my home, Dickie. And I can be your home too. The Titans can all be your home.”

“But I’m not Robin anymore.”

Donna presses a light kiss to his cheek, and he almost reaches up to feel the trace of warmth it leaves.

“We love you for you. _I_ love you for you, Boy Wonder. Whether you’re wearing panties or spandex, you’re my best friend. This changes nothing.”

“But—”

She puts a finger to his lips, lacing their fingers together and tugging him along to her room. Her beds unmade, messy, and he wonders if he woke her.

“Come here,” she says, tugging him behind her under the covers. He kicks off his shoes and shifts under the thick gold-beaded blankets until he’s beside her, until the warmth of her arm melds into his skin. Donna presses another soft kiss to his cheek, eyes shut.

Dick feels warmer as she pulls away.

“You’ve had a long night, and you look like you haven’t slept in weeks. We’re going to take a nap, and we can deal with this all in the morning. Okay?”

Dick nods, almost smiling as she wraps herself around him, tangling their limbs together the way they always wake up.

“Okay,” he echoes, brushing his lips over the crown of his head.

He breathes out a shaky sigh, feeling affection replace some of the ice cutting at his heart from Bruce’s…Bruce-ness.

“I love you,” he tells her, pressing it into the curve of her shoulder as he shifts. Her eyes are closed, but he can see her smile.

“I love you too.”

It’s the best sleep he’s had in months.


End file.
